Carroll Eventyr attempted then to reach across to Terence Overbaby, St. Blaise’s wingman. Jumped by a skyful of MEs and no way out. The inputs were confusing. Peter Sachsa intimated that there were in fact many versions of the Angel which might apply. Overbaby’s was not as available as certain others. There are problems with levels, and with Judgment, in the Tarot sense… . This is part of the storm that sweeps now among them all, both sides of Death. It is unpleasant. On his side, Eventyr tends to feel wholly victimized, even a bit resentful. Peter Sachsa, on his, falls amazingly out of character and into nostalgia for life, the old peace, the Weimar decadence that kept him fed and moving. Taken forcibly over in 1930 by a blow from a police truncheon during a street action in Neukölln, he recalls now, sentimentally, evenings of rubbed darkwood, cigar smoke, ladies in chiseled jade, panne, attar of damask roses, the latest angular pastel paintings on the walls, the latest drugs inside the many little table drawers. More than any mere “Kreis,” on most nights full mandalas came to bloom: all degrees of society, all quarters of the capital, palms down on that famous blood veneer, touching only at little fingers. Sachsa’s table was like a deep pool in the forest. Beneath the surface things were rolling, slipping, beginning to rise… . Walter Asch (“Taurus”) was visited one night by something so unusual it took three “Hieropons” (250 mg.) to bring him back, and even so he seemed reluctant to sleep. They all stood watching him, in ragged rows resembling athletic formations, Wimpe the IG-man who happened to be holding the Hieropon keying on Sargner, a civilian attached to General Staff, flanked by Lieutent Weissmann, recently back from South-West Africa, and the Herero aide he’d brought with him, staring, staring at them all, at everything… while behind them ladies moved in a sibilant weave, sequins and high-albedo stockings aflash, black-and-white make-up in daintily nasal alarm, eyes wide going oh… . Each face that watched Walter Asch was a puppet stage: each a separate routine.

… shows good hands yes droop and wrists as far up as muscle relaxant respiratory depression…

… same… same… my own face white in mirror three three-thirty four march of the Hours clock ticking room no can’t go in no not enough light not enough no aaahhh—

… theatre nothing but Walter really look at head phony angle wants to catch light good fill-light throw a yellow gel…

(A pneumatic toy frog jumps up onto a lily pad trembling: beneath the surface lies a terror… a late captivity… but he floats now over the head of what would take him back… his eyes cannot be read… .)

… mba rara m’eroto ondyoze… mbe mu munine m’oruroto ayo u n’omuinyo… (further back than this is a twisting of yarns or cordage, a giant web, a wrenching of hide, of muscles in the hard grip of something that comes to wrestle when the night is deep… and a sense, too, of visitation by the dead, afterward a sick feeling that they are not as friendly as they seemed to be… he has wakened, cried, sought explanation, but no one ever told him anything he could believe. The dead have talked with him, come and sat, shared his milk, told stories of ancestors, or of spirits from other parts of the veld—for time and space on their side have no meaning, all is together).